Long before we had our first child John and I made a commitment to Jesus Christ. We were new Christians and did not know exactly what living a Christian life entailed, but we were determined to try. The result of that search was an encounter with Jehovah-Shammah—The Lord who is there.
In the Mid 1960s I worked as a secretary in a large bank building in downtown El Paso. Since I usually did not leave the building during my lunch break, I often picked up some yogurt at the concession stand on the first floor. Because I saw the woman who owned the stand nearly every day, we soon struck up a friendship. She often mentioned that she was making more money on her concession stand than she had ever dreamed possible, and from what I could observe of her rapidly expanding business I had no reason to doubt her claims.
One day she told me that a new Holiday Inn was being built downtown about three blocks from our building. The owner had approached her about putting in a concession stand at the Holiday Inn, but she felt that she could not run both. She told me that if I wanted the Holiday Inn concession stand, she could definitely get it for me. Then she added excitedly, “You will make a lot more money there than I do here because you will sell liquor.” She went on to say that there is a huge profit in selling packaged liquor. She would teach me everything I needed to know and help me get my business set up. I immediately felt uneasy about selling liquor, but I did not say anything. I told my friend that I would talk to John about it.
That evening I told John about this “business opportunity,” and he was very excited. However, John agreed that selling liquor might not be what Jesus would want us to do. The next day I told my friend that we would really love to have the concession, but we did not want to sell liquor. She responded that selling liquor was a condition of being awarded the concession.
John and I prayed and asked God if selling liquor would be okay, and for the next few days we constantly discussed the matter between the two of us. This was our reasoning:
If people want to drink, they are going to buy liquor whether we sell it to them or not.
- We are not going to try to persuade anyone to buy liquor; they will be coming to us.
- Most of our sales will come from other items; everyone staying in a hotel needs toiletries, snacks, and reading material.
- The people who buy the liquor will be taking it back to their rooms to drink it so, in a way, we will be keeping them safe by preventing them from driving drunk.
One evening when I came home from work I pulled a tri-fold flyer from the mailbox. Someone had circled a portion with a pen which read: “Satan never endorses God’s enterprises. God’s true friends never support Satan’s enterprises.”
John and I were blown away! The only ones who knew about our situation were John, me, and God! We had received our answer. God had sent us mail! I kept the flyer for several weeks, and from time to time I took it out and looked at it. I was naïve, but I was pretty sure that there are no post offices in Heaven.
Finally, one day as I stood staring at the perfectly circled message, it dawned on me that since this was a tri-fold, maybe I should open it and see what was inside. When I did, I saw that it was from an acquaintance of ours who was a lay preacher in the Methodist church. He had circled his name and the time that he was going to be delivering a sermon in the church where the flyer had originated. The date of his sermon had long since passed, but the ink had bled through and made a perfect outline around God’s message to John and me. The line was so sharp and circled those words so precisely that it was difficult to believe that this was not the message our acquaintance had meant to send.
Remember this: When you really, sincerely want to know something, all you have to do is ask God. He is Jehovah-Shammah—the Lord who is there, and He will answer—even if He has to send you mail.
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